Getting the GHC Sources

There are two ways to get sources to GHC: download a source distribution, or get the sources directly from our repository using ​git.

Source distributions

A source distribution is a file like ghc-7.0.4-src.tar.bz2, which contains a complete snapshot of the source tree for a particular version of GHC. Source distributions for all versions of GHC are available from the download page.
In addition to fixed releases of GHC, source distributions are also made each night from the current source repository, for both the HEAD and STABLE branches. To download these snapshots, head over to the download page.

Source distributions are easier to build, because we also include the output from running certain external tools like ​Happy, so you don't need to install these tools. See Building/Preparation for details.

Getting a GHC repository using git

Please make sure that you have the correct name and email address set for Git that you want your commits to be recorded as. Make sure you use the same name and email on all your machines so we can easily track a single author. This can be done in Git by running:

Then, if you are on Windows, ensure that git handles line-endings sanely by running:

$ git config --global core.autocrlf false

A source tree consists of more than one repository: at the top level there is the main GHC repository, and certain subdirectories contain separate git repositories (for a list see Repositories). To get a complete repository tree using git:

$ git clone git://git.haskell.org/ghc.git
$ cd ghc
$ ./sync-all get

Note: If you're behind a firewall blocking port 9418 (or git clone git://... fails for some other reason), replace git:// by http:// in the instructions above.

This uses the ssh:// protocol (which has much higher latency due to the SSH handshake occurring for each connect) only for git push operations, and the very fast unauthenticated git:// protocol for everything else.

You will probably also want to run

$ git config --global diff.ignoreSubmodules dirty

to stop git in the ghc repo from checking for unrecorded changes in the submodules.

Making a local clone

You can make a local clone of a GHC tree with

$ git clone ~/ghc ~/ghc-branch

where ~/ghc is the repository you want to branch and ~/ghc-branch is where you want to put the branch. Then use sync-all as before to clone the rest of the repositories. Note that the origin for the local clone will point back to the repository that it was cloned from - if you want origin to point back to the main GHC repo then do this:

$ ./sync-all -r git://git.haskell.org remote set-url origin

Getting a branch

The above instructions will get the HEAD, the main trunk of GHC development. There are also branches, from which stable releases are made. The active branches are listed on Repositories.

To get a branch, you need to get from a repo that contains the branch; in particular, local clones of the central repo will normally not include the branches that are in the central repo.

Getting a GHC repository from GitHub

To get GHC repository from ​GitHub we recommend to just get GHC source code itself from GitHub and combine this with packages from ​http://git.haskell.org. This is easy since sync-all script supports it well.

Pulling new patches

The sync-all script makes it easy to pull new patches. For example, sync-all pull will pull all new patches from the original repository into the repository tree in the current directory.

Tracking the full repository state

The full state of a GHC repository includes the current state of the repositories for all of the GHC boot libraries that are used to to build GHC (list of boot libraries). The repositories for these libraries are fetched and updated by the sync-all script. To record the full repository state (including boot libraries), git submodules could be used, but they are not currently in favor (see GHC Team perspective on submodules for some reasons why).

As an alternative to git submodules, the fingerprint.py script in utils/fingerprint/ can create a "fingerprint" to uniquely identify a GHC repository state by recording the current commits of the GHC and boot library repositories. This fingerprint can be used later to restore the state of all repositories to the state captured by the fingerprint.

To create a new fingerprint, run the create command in the top level ghc repo. The fingerprint can also be created from a Builder log that contains the appropriate output from the sync-all command by passing the log file to the create command with the -l flag.

This command will read the fingerprint and perform a checkout of the appropriate commit for each repository found in the fingerprint. By default, the restore command will create a new branch in the top level ghc repository and add an entry to git config that sets the new branch's remote to origin. The config options are added so that future sync-all commands will work as expected. Passing the -n flag will cause the fingerprint script not to create a new branch. To "unrestore" a fingerprint, simply use sync-all to checkout the master branch in each repository

$ ./sync-all checkout master

To make the best use of fingerprinting, you need to collect fingerprints for the states you may wish to restore. To ease the automatic collection of fingerprints, the fingerprint.py script allows a -d DIR option that will output a fingerprint to the directory DIR with the current time stamp as a file name. The -g DIR option tells the script to run in the ghc repository pointed to by DIR. These options can be useful for collecting fingerprints as a cron job or on a post-commit hook.

To restore the repository state as of a particular date, you can grab a fingerprint emitted by one of the nightly builds. The nightly build emails are sent to ​the ghc-builds mailing list, and have subjects like "[nightly] 06-Oct-2012 build of HEAD on x86_64-unknown-linux (cam-04-unx)". Copy and paste the fingerprint section, which looks something like this: